Assignment 9 part 1- Patent Troll discussion

Patent trolls as previously defined are companies that have no intentions of using patents to produce or license the intellectual property but rather simply wish to sue and threaten to sue companies who "infringe" or are potentially infringing. In many of these cases there is no actual belief that a company is infringing on a patent, but it is protected by the first amendment to send legal letters threatening a lawsuit for a potential patent infringement.

 In plain english this is blackmail, and it is protected by the first amendment rights. Many times companies will send these letters to many companies hoping that one of them will be a sucker enough to settle and just pay the company money.

Another issue with this is loosely worded patents that are utterly unspecific and thus allow for a large domain of potential infringement, but when inspected in further depth the patent should not have been issued in the first place as in many cases it is obvious or anticipated. As a result there are patent trolls who own a couple of loosely worded older patents that arguably give a company a hold over a large domain of intellectual property, and thus stop innovation and industry growth in a certain area.

upon closer examination many of these patents would not pass a patent review board, which is why most patent troll companies hope to get most of their revenue from getting people to pay a licensing fee through extorting them with letters and threatening correspondence. Patent trolls generally do not want to go through a litigation process and more use it as a threat because the legal fees are extremely expensive.